Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Why I Don’t Recycle

I.

I used to recycle religiously. My environmental-scientist
roommate helped me learn how to twist off caps, tear off labels, and flatten
plastic cartons. We kept our recycling in a big wicker basket, and every other
week we would empty the paper and bottles into a bin and drag it to the curb to
be picked up, trucked off, sorted, and crushed – remade.

I don’t do that anymore. I throw plastic bottles in with
cardboard in with banana peels almost like I don’t believe that the damage we
are doing to our planet is irreversible. It’s not that I don’t believe in
recycling and not that I don’t want to do it – but the systems that are in
place around me simply aren’t set up in a way that makes it possible.

The fact is that recycling as I thought of it in Michigan
doesn’t really exist in Honduras. There are no wicker baskets, and definitely
no curb-side bins. Instead, at the end of the week, my host dad will drive our
bags of trash to the single dumpster that serves our entire hillside community.

For people who don’t have a vehicle and can’t make the walk
down the steep hill with their bags of trash, the street has to do. Throwing
garbage in the streets is not a good thing – but for many it’s the only real
option. Throwing things away, let alone recycling, isn’t a moral decision, it’s
a practical one.

It’s impossible to understand individual behavior without understanding the systems that provoke it, the balance of costs and benefits that always lead people to consider or decline actions.

In the United States, I didn’t recycle because I was a
better person than the people who live here in Honduras – I recycled because it
was easy, because single-stream recycling and curb-side pick-up tipped the
balance of costs and benefits so far towards recycling that one would have to
be actively against recycling not to do it.

I could judge Hondurans for not making the same decisions I
used to make in the United States – but that would be ignoring the fact that
our decisions aren’t actually the same at all.

I don’t recycle here because I can’t recycle here. Because
of the lack of any recycling system, because of the way that materials are
reused in different ways, no one would blame me. As I realized this, I started
to think about other systems, how decisions I think people should be making may
not actually be a meaningful option for them.

II.

In Honduras, about 4% of murders result in an arrest,
leaving an astonishing 96% impunity rate for homicides. Victims of crimes don’t
always report them to the police, witnesses of crimes don’t testify, and
dangerous criminals are left on the street.

The answer to this seems obvious – people should report
crimes, lawyers should prosecute them, and judges should punish them. Yet
Honduras’s justice system is riddled with roadblocks and dangers that generally
mean involvement carries a much higher cost than benefit.

How could I tell people here that they need to cooperate
with the justice system when doing so means risking death threats for
themselves and their families? Witnesses have been shot for cooperating, their
names revealed by corrupt police officers. Lawyers have been assassinated for
standing up to the wrong people. Bribes and rampant bias mean that the wealthy
and powerful are far less likely to be charged with a crime, let alone
convicted of it, while the poor have none of these protections.

The fact that Hondurans don’t often bring cases to be
prosecuted is not a problem of apathy, of laziness, or of disinterest – it is a
structural problem that keeps everyone from equal access to justice. The
balance of costs and benefits is warped – the choice to trust a broken system
isn’t a meaningful choice.

It works the other way too – the costs of standing up
against corruption are high, but the costs of corruption itself might be quite
low. Without justice systems that regularly prosecute corruption, the scales
are tipped again, leading people who in other situations would follow the rules
to decide the benefits of crime are too attractive to ignore.

Context matters. Attaching moral significance to systemic
failures too often blames the most vulnerable for their own problems. In the
United States, it’s easy to feel moral superiority for doing things –
recycling, eating organic, getting a college education, even trusting police
officers – that simply aren’t meaningful choices for others.

These decisions aren’t always up to individuals. If we
believe that eating organic is important, we need to do more than tell people to
do so, we need to invest in making this food cheaper and more accessible. Valuing
higher education means changing patterns of costs and benefits so that it’s a
real option for students regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic
background. Increasing trust in police means ensuring that their interactions
with people of all backgrounds are equally above reproach.

People aren’t always going to make the same decisions as me.
Sometimes this is because they disagree with me – they don’t think recycling is
important, they’re attracted by the corruption’s apparent benefits. But more
often than I realize, there is no real decision for them to make.

I don’t want to say that what is good or what is right should
be easy. But what is good should be possible, and it should be possible for
everyone. Individual choices matter, but what matters more is the existence of
choice in the first place.

That is part of why I get so excited about the work we do
here. It is more than throwing a single can in a recycling bin. It is more than
throwing a single person in prison. It is a fundamental readjustment of entire
systems of benefits and costs, making it easier to do what is good and harder
to break the rules – giving everyone the real opportunity to make choices that are better for them and better for our world..